Recent reviews by Kezyma

A very strange experience, which is what it is as opposed to a 'game'. It plays out like an interactive longform youtube video/documentary.

It's certainly got a message it's trying to convey, but what that message is will depend on your own experiences and your opinion of the creator and their intelligence, it could be a pretentious and smug comment on the author's experiences, a commentary on someone being confident in their own understanding when it's flawed, some meta level commentary on how you think you understand something as you're experiencing it only to have that understanding shattered, or just an excuse to make some cash on a series of unfinished 'games' that were thrown together over a couple of weeks.

I don't know what the intention was, but for what was less than 75 minutes of my life, I found it interesting enough conceptually to suggest it even if I didn't find it as meaningful as some others have done so. At moments I thought it was incredibly interesting and could relate to it in some way, at other moments I thought it was pure cringe or rage-bait.

I'd avoid any spoilers as with a 'game' this short, even the most minimal information will entirely ruin the thing, especially due to how the story is told, which is why I've been so vague in my review.

If you have an hour and a half to kill, there are many worse ways you could spend it than trying this out, you might get something really interesting out of it, and if you don't, it was only an hour and a half, which means you could even get it refunded if you wanted to.

To say anything good about this game would be to neglect to mention everything else that's good about this game. The best title since Mass Effect, perhaps even better.

If you have yet to play it, you should. If you have already played it, you should do so again.

I'm leaving a negative review because there's no 'mixed' option, this game is going to be exactly what some people want, and incredibly disappointing for others. I'd give it somewhere around a 6-7/10 based on my personal taste.

If you enjoy the modern Bethesda sandbox experience that you got with Skyrim and Fallout 4, this is more of the same, in a new setting. If you prefer a little more sci-fi than fantasy or post-apocalypse, you'll probably get more fun out of it than those games. In fact, if that's what you're looking for, skip this review, this game will suit you perfectly.

However, if you've come here for a unique and interesting main story, you wont find it here. The story feels like it's constructed from parts lifted from other space games, notably to me, Mass Effect and No Man's Sky, with more of the latter than the former, in fact, a lot of this game feels like a lite version of those two titles. My biggest gripe though, is that the biggest mystery of the story goes entirely unanswered, unless I missed some critical piece of information.

The companions and characters I've interacted with so far appear to be very much Bethesda style Fallout characters in space, and lack depth compared to characters in more companion driven RPG titles. For better characters, you'd be best served with a replay of Mass Effect or a run through Baldur's Gate 3. Both of those games also handle choice, consequence and reactivity far better than this game does.

The exploration of space is also somewhat lacking. There's actually very little to do there, since flying to other planets takes literal hours and you cant seamlessly land on them anyway, space is just a place to have a random encounter before you hit the menu to fast travel to a different system or to land on a planet. While the visual depiction of space itself is better, No Man's Sky does exploration far better than this game.

With the primary negatives out of the way, this game does do some things well.

The cities, while generic in theme, have clearly had a lot of attention put into them and are visually great to explore. There's plenty of mundane tasks to do in them that could fill up your time while taking in the sights.

The lack of city map is something many have complained about, but I think is also a positive. Navigating places with in-world markers really aids in exploring those cities with more immersion instead of just looking for the shortest route to every goal to check off another quest from the list.

If you enjoy the crafting and base building from Fallout, those systems are here too. They aren't for me, and I have no desire to interact with them, but anyone who likes that sort of thing will have a lot of stuff to do. The ship building is quite novel, if not a bit clunky to move parts around.

And finally, with a minor spoiler warning: The 'new game plus' implementation's added variation to the game world is quite interesting, and while not enough to warrant continually replaying everything, when the differences show up, they make for a novel change to the game.

I'll continue now with the side content and faction questlines, as well as finishing the achievements, so if anything happens that changes my opinion, I'll update the review!

From all of the advertising prior to this games release, you could be forgiven for believing that this was a spiritual successor to Fallout New Vegas, a deep crafted universe with moral ambiguity and consequences for each decision you make.

The Outer Worlds is not this. While the visual style is appealing and the settings are interesting to explore, there's no depth behind them whatsoever. The gameplay can be fun and if you're not interested in an RPG with a rich story, you might have a better experience than I did. Otherwise, this really isn't going to be the game you want.

When you encounter NPCs and quests, they all follow the same formula; 'corporations are bad and stupid'
In The Outer Worlds, corporations are the name given to tyrannical governments, the only thing really distinguishing them from a realistic tyrannical government being that they are woefully incompetent at literally everything they do. They aren't aware that they need water to live or a varied diet to survive and even their slogans, which, while clearly meant to be humour, fall flat and only serve to make the 'bad guys' seem even more stupid.

The entire narrative of the universe starts to fall apart when you then ask simply 'how did we even get here? where did this city come from?' and you realise that these corporations that somehow don't know how food works, somehow managed to invent stasis technology and faster-than-light travel and colonised entire worlds only to starve because they didn't realise humans need to eat more than just tuna. Marauders roam the land as generic bandits to serve as somewhere to put the excessive amount of ammunition that you'll collect while exploring what feels more like a looter-shooter than anything else.

There's no moral grey area here, the corporations are always bad and wrong, there's also no real consequences for your decisions, both immediately in gameplay and across the broader narrative, stealth is almost impossible to fail and ammo is abundant. Skills are easy to level and don't require any managing or specialising, the game is simply a cycle of killing things, hoovering up worthless loot and then going back to town to let them know that actually, plants need fertiliser to grow.

What you end up with is a game where you never feel under any threat, the tyrannical corporations are far too incompetent to do anything to you and the people opposing them seem just as incompetent even just for the fact that they haven't been able to defeat them. Every character feels like the 'stupid husband' cliche and you're the only character in the universe that's even capable of forming a rational thought. This makes it far less rewarding to defeat your enemies or save your friends, or really anything in the universe, since you really can't have any kind of respect for the characters themselves.

There's plenty more that could be said about this game, it makes no effort to be any more than another shallow looter-shooter with one-note humour and a rather weak 'corporations bad' message made only more ironic due to the fact that this is a £50 game a year after release that had an exclusivity deal for a separate platform until now.